A novel that questions the right of an author to appropriate stories as it defends the right of the character to live them.
Lucy Lurie, the character at the heart of J.M. Coetzee’s acclaimed novel Disgrace, is reimagined as a real person struggling with the aftermath of both her rape and the use of her trauma as a symbol for the ostensibly larger ordeals of a post-apartheid South Africa.
Two years ago, Lucy Lurie was raped. Her attack was particularly brutal—there were multiple assailants, all of whom were strangers—and was widely reported upon by the South African media. Lucy, who is a junior lecturer at the fictional University of Constantia in Cape Town, recovers physically from her assault, but she struggles with severe PTSD, which leaves her with debilitating anxiety and agoraphobia. Prevented from working by her psychological condition, Lucy becomes more and more isolated, her social circle eventually reduced to the company of her therapist; her friend Moira, a self-proclaimed “literary star-fucker”; and her father, who witnessed her rape but seems to have moved on. Lucy’s ongoing trauma is further complicated by the fact that the formidable John Coetzee, a former senior colleague of hers at the university, has written a literary blockbuster based on her experience. And here’s where Snyckers’ book gets tricky. Because, of course, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace does center the violent rape of the fictional character Lucy Lurie by a group of black African farm laborers as the lacuna that shapes the book’s overarching narrative metaphor. Snyckers’ Lucy Lurie, in the tradition of Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, insists on both the reclamation of her personal experience and the recognition of her erasure. However, unlike Rhys' Antoinette, who lives fully enmeshed in the systemic oppressions enacted upon her, Snyckers’ Lucy is a sharp, analytical thinker well versed in the post-structuralist theory that makes her argument both trenchant and assailable. Snyckers’ Lucy takes issue with her fictional counterpart’s placid acceptance of her role as “the vessel through which the new world order will be born, in the person of her brown child.” Snyckers’ Lucy would like Synckers’ Coetzee—a figure akin to the real-life author but also understood as a fiction in his own right—to acknowledge the ways in which his appropriation of her narrative was a secondary reenactment of her trauma. Her quest for that reckoning becomes the central hinge upon which this surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging book swings.
A novel that questions the right of an author to appropriate stories as it defends the right of the character to live them.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-725-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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